Soundtracks that are poorly-used in the game
Apr 23, 2018 10:11:17 GMT -5
Post by phediuk on Apr 23, 2018 10:11:17 GMT -5
For whatever reason, the music isn't bad, but the game makes poor use of it for some reason or another. Maybe the sound mixing is terrible so you can't hear it. Maybe it plays a really annoying track a lot at the expense of others. Maybe a lot of the game is played in silence even though there's no reason it should be. Stuff like that.
The games that inspired this thread were the Shining Force series, which has some of the most bafflingly idiotic sound design I've ever encountered in a video game. Literally every time you have a character attack an enemy, the game switches to the battle theme, which invariably plays for only the first few seconds until the attack is finished, and then the game switches back to the map music, which starts again from the beginning of the track, every single time. So for literally the entire series you're hearing the first two or three seconds of two tracks played over and over and over and over and over again. My god, why? The composition of the tracks is great and I like listening to the OSTs, but you never get to hear them in the game itself because you're constantly attacking enemies and thus resetting the music. There are so many easy solutions they could've done: first, they could've just had the map music pick up from the point where it left off before the battle. Now, I know what you're thinking, there might be a technical issue preventing this, and I thought of that too (but maybe not, since even the fucking remake on the GBA didn't fix this issue.) Okay, let's work under that assumption; in that case, then, they could've dispensed with the battle music altogether (since there's only one of them and it gets really monotonous anyway) and just played the map music continuously throughout a given level (the Langrisser series does this and is infinitely more pleasant to listen to as a result.) And even if they didn't want to do that, they could've included an option to turn off battle animations to prevent the transitions from happening at all. And no, the GBA remake couldn't even be arsed to do that.
I just don't get it. It's such a black mark against the series and a waste of great music. I usually play them muted because hearing the first few notes of every track a thousand times is so irritating, especially in 2 where it starts with this huge crescendo.
Hear those first three seconds? Now imagine hearing that 20 times in the span of 5 minutes. ugh.
The games that inspired this thread were the Shining Force series, which has some of the most bafflingly idiotic sound design I've ever encountered in a video game. Literally every time you have a character attack an enemy, the game switches to the battle theme, which invariably plays for only the first few seconds until the attack is finished, and then the game switches back to the map music, which starts again from the beginning of the track, every single time. So for literally the entire series you're hearing the first two or three seconds of two tracks played over and over and over and over and over again. My god, why? The composition of the tracks is great and I like listening to the OSTs, but you never get to hear them in the game itself because you're constantly attacking enemies and thus resetting the music. There are so many easy solutions they could've done: first, they could've just had the map music pick up from the point where it left off before the battle. Now, I know what you're thinking, there might be a technical issue preventing this, and I thought of that too (but maybe not, since even the fucking remake on the GBA didn't fix this issue.) Okay, let's work under that assumption; in that case, then, they could've dispensed with the battle music altogether (since there's only one of them and it gets really monotonous anyway) and just played the map music continuously throughout a given level (the Langrisser series does this and is infinitely more pleasant to listen to as a result.) And even if they didn't want to do that, they could've included an option to turn off battle animations to prevent the transitions from happening at all. And no, the GBA remake couldn't even be arsed to do that.
I just don't get it. It's such a black mark against the series and a waste of great music. I usually play them muted because hearing the first few notes of every track a thousand times is so irritating, especially in 2 where it starts with this huge crescendo.
Hear those first three seconds? Now imagine hearing that 20 times in the span of 5 minutes. ugh.
